27
28 Comments

I'm writing a book about how my co-founder and I bootstrapped our SaaS to $50k—with 0 employees. Here's the 1st chapter (it's free)

I recently announced that we hit $50k MRR for our social media scheduling tool OneUp

I then got a ton of questions about how we found our customers

I said I was going to write a short book on everything we did to acquire customers

Well I just finished the first chapter of the book 📖

Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think 🤓

👇

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hDTWgD-VQoBrvwsuLDqDYNMenKhIXVeApKc0L5oaUDQ/edit?usp=sharing

☝️

  1. 3

    Ay thanks for sharing the first chapter! I remember when you guys first started OneUp... seeing your success is inspirational!

    Good thoughts on getting traffic from reddit! My main question is: were you able to track your success with reddit in any tangible way? Without linking it seems it would be hard (or impossible) to determine where exactly people initially found OneUp and if the reddit posting was actually paying off. Would love your thoughts on that!

    1. 2

      Hey Kyle, you're right, you definitely sacrifice a lot of the attribution when you don't link to your product.

      We have found that a ton of our users came to us from Google searches for "OneUp", which means they are discovering us somewhere, and then finding us on Google.

      Also in our onboarding emails, we would ask users how they heard about OneUp, and a ton of people would mention they saw a comment of mine on Reddit.

      So it's not really something I can verify with analytics, but I know anecdotally that it's working :)

      1. 1

        Cool, makes sense. I expected it was something like that. Congrats again on the success!!

        1. 1

          Thanks Kyle, appreciate it!

  2. 1

    First,
    was a great read
    Second, I hope it might help you get more people on the list if you add a little note that you won't sell data/email to anyone (although Im pretty sure you aint gonna do it, but anyways always good to write)
    Thanks for this, waiting for it to be published.

  3. 1

    This is great. I am very curious to understand how you actually break into this niche? I mean, the "social media scheduling tools" space is super competitive, with many 9 and 10 figure companies. Super interesting to see you hit $50k MRR, keep going!

    1. 2

      Hey Aman, all the competitors actually serve as validation that people are willing to pay for a tool like this. We just had to carve out our niche :)

  4. 1
    1. What's the percentage of traffic you are getting from Reddit? @DavisBaer

    This would help us understand where to concentrate efforts upon in early days.

    1. Also how did you differentiate compared to the established tools out there?
  5. 1

    Just subscribed to your email list and bookmarked the Google Docs link, I really enjoyed the chapter!

    What channels other than Reddit contributed the most for your growth?

    1. 2

      Thanks Stef!

      SEO has been the biggest channel

  6. 1

    Thanks for sharing, its really helpful. I had a tough time figuring out how to use reddit for my startup. And great to see two co-founders in different countries and still doing well at early stage.Congratulations on $50K.

    1. 1

      Glad to hear this was helpful for you :)

  7. 1

    Hey Davis, just read your first chapter - excellent mate. I am actually in the process of launching a SaaS growth marketing Newsletter. I would love to do a breakdown of your growth tactics once the book is done. Or perhaps we could do a small interview? If you're up for it, give me a message. If not, all the best with the book and OneUp - it looks great.

    1. 1

      Where can I sign up?

        1. 1

          Thanks! Just signed up. Are you planning in turning this into a paid subscription?

          1. 1

            Hey, thanks for signing up. Not paid initially, but perhaps in the future. We'll aim to keep it free with sponsorships and some affiliate stuff for monetization.

  8. 1

    Thank you for sharing. Congratulations on the $50k!

    1. 1

      Thanks, hope it was helpful :)

  9. 1

    thanks for sharing! did you try any direct sales via DMs or messages?

    1. 1

      Hey Tommy, do you mean DMs on Reddit specifically?

      1. 1

        yeah, or if someone asked a question, if you responded via DM if that had some success.

        1. 1

          Sometimes I'd DM someone our website if they were having trouble finding it, but for the most part I try to stick to commenting. That way, if someone else has the same question, your comment can be seen by everyone

  10. 1

    This looks really interesting and this is one of the problem that most of the new programmer building a product for the first time faces. Really looking forward to read the complete book.

  11. 1

    Nice work, signed up to the email list already 👍

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 14 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments